PUZZLE

KU-RO

Description:

Bio:

KU-RO is a Deva in service of the God Moradin. He was tasked with restoring a fabled shrine of Moradin and bringing to justice one C.C. Greyskull, a criminal who had supposedly defiled it centuries before.

He possesses a strait-laced, no-nonsense attitude.

Story

Origin

A little over two decades ago, a baker living on slopes of Mount Emberstare attempted to make an enormous bread sculpture when he was distracted by a lunar eclipse (where the moon turned as red as blood, et cetera et cetera.) The sculpture, which was supposed to be a sundial, was practice for a bread and pastry competition to be held at the birthday party of a local warlord. The baker, just returning from gawking at the eclipse, retrieved the bread sculpture from the oven, and found that the sculpture had become mishappen and didn’t resemble a sundial at all. Disappointed, he loaded the sculpture on a cart, so he could bring it to the nearby storeroom. He planned to hand it off to a relative or donate the failed bread sculpture to an orphanage or something nice like that.

As he was wheeling the cart from his mountainside bakery to the storeroom, he noticed the cart becoming noticably heavier—as if he were pulling a large dog along with the bread sculpture. It continued to become heavier: now it was as if the large dog were also wearing chainmail. He grew worried a wolf or feral hound had crawled into the cart—he stopped pulling and backed away slowly. But he had forgotten to engage the brakes, and the cart rolled onward without him, bouncing down the mountain path, picking up speed. The sturdy thing crashed through a barn door, coming to rest in a bale of hay.

The defective sculpture, meanwhile, had become dislodged from the cart and was in the process of bouncing down the mountainside. It struck a few rocks that also began to tumble just behind it. A few rocks soon became a landslide. Goats and mountain lions bounded out of the way of the wave of devastation gathered mass and momentum.

Chance had it that a large mercenary band of orcs was in the process of terrorizing a village in the valley below. They planned to kill everyone and take a retired High Priest of Moradin hostage, hoping to fetch a hardy ransom. The orc commander a few lieutenants had already rounded up the townspeople for slaughter, while the majority of the forces stood around, jeering in their triumph. The leader of the orcs brought the high priest so he would be forced to watch the flammable grease-covered townspeople burn alive in a pit the orcs had dug. Just then, the earth began to shake. On the mountainside above all saw an immense wave of earth, stone, and dust bearing down towards them.

Before they could act, the landslide was upon them. Orcs screamed as the earth enveloped them. Standing on a balcony above, the leader instinctively drew a knife and held it to the throat of the high priest, snarling something about a surprise attack, and that the high priest would pay with his life now for the treachery.

Just then, a strangely elastic rock slammed into a pile of crates and bounced up into the balcony area. Spinning wildly, it slammed into the orc leader, who staggered backwards, losing his weapon and dropping his hostage, the high pries, onto the balcony floor. The orc leader bumped into the balcony railing, and, flailing his arms fell backwards off the balcony landing with a splat in a large cart of pointy art objects the orcs had just looted.

The rumbling below ceased as the landslide finally settled. The high priest, prone on the ground, looked up. In the red moonlight he saw the stone that had knocked over his captor: a giant boulder, strangely shaped. He would recount for the rest of his life that it was shaped like a hammer striking an anvil, the symbol of Moradin.

The sight lasted only for an instant: out of the “boulder” burst forth a grown humanoid man with faintly glowling skin, adorned in chainmail and funny clothing. To the shock and surprise of the high priest, the funny-dressed man had no sooner burst from the boulder than he began eating the stone itself, consuming the entire thing in less than a minute, a completely impossible feat, the “boulder” having been much larger than the man himself.

The glowing, funny-dressed man burped, excused himself, brushed some crumbs off of then turned to the high priest and in a serious voice politely asked where he was and what had just happened.

Wrath of Moradin

The High Priest soon identified this man as a Deva—an worldly incarnation of an immortal creature with the memory of many lifetimes. However, upon questioning, the deva only remembered two syllables—“KU-RO”, presumably his own name.

Miraculously, all the townspeople survived the landslide. The landslide trapped them in the pit and would have buried them alive if the shaking hadn’t also compromised the ceiling of a cellar below, which belonged to a wealthy pillow merchant. They hailed KU-RO as their hero and all decided to devote the rest of their lives to Moradin.

The orcs that hadn’t been killed in the landslide fled the scene, terrified.

The priest shrugged and took credit for the summoning; thenceforth KU-RO became a servant of the temple in the village.